{"id":383,"date":"2012-08-17T12:32:39","date_gmt":"2012-08-17T10:32:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/2012\/07\/27\/lme4_destined_to_become_stable_through_rounding\/"},"modified":"2012-08-12T21:42:17","modified_gmt":"2012-08-12T19:42:17","slug":"lme4_destined_to_become_stable_through_rounding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/2012\/08\/17\/lme4_destined_to_become_stable_through_rounding\/","title":{"rendered":"lme4: destined to become stable through rounding?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>(this would have appeared on my blog on <i>Nature Network<\/i>, but the pulled the plug the day before. Sometimes correlation does not mean causation)<\/p>\n<p>Fans of R and mixed models are aware of the <a href=\"http:\/\/cran.r-project.org\/web\/packages\/lme4\/\/index.html\">lme4<\/a> package. This started out as Doug Bates re-writing the lme package using the new capabilities in R (S4 objects, for those who care about such things). It goes back to at least 2006, but isn&#8217;t stable yet: a source of mild amusement for me over the last few years. In software development, an un-stable version has a number starting with 0 (e.g. 0.4), and once the developers are happy with it, it gets upgraded to v1.0. The core R developers released R1.0-0 on the 29th February 2000, citing it as the nerdiest date possible, being an exception to an exception.<br \/>\nAnyway, the version numbers of lme4 show the problems: v0.999375 was released in 2008. I just checked and the latest version is 0.999999-0-1. This is more compactly (and more confusingly) written as 1-1e06-0-1.<br \/>\nI have been worried that lme4 will never become stable, but this latest version mollifies me with the thought that the developers can&#8217;t go on forever, so eventually lme4 will become stable when the machine precision forces it to be rounded up to 1.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(this would have appeared on my blog on Nature Network, but the pulled the plug the day before. Sometimes correlation does not mean causation) Fans of R and mixed models are aware of the lme4 package. This started out as &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/2012\/08\/17\/lme4_destined_to_become_stable_through_rounding\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-r","category-silliness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/boboh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}